Established a means to prioritise and guide decisions to optimise the use of land, and

Helped resolve competition or conflicts relating to future land use change.

Aberdeenshire Land Use Strategy Pilot

The Aberdeenshire Pilot was primarily focused on issues of rural land use change. The key aim of the Pilot was to create a framework which summarised policy and environmental information for users and indicated where particular types of land use change might be beneficial or detrimental in line with policy goals and climate change mitigation/adaption. Links to the final products, including a web-based tool and reports of the projects stages, can be found below. The Pilot took a strong partnership approach with the James Hutton Institute as key delivery partner and a wide range of stakeholders represented on the Project Board.

Local Focus Areas

The Pilot operated at two geographic scales. The first being the full Aberdeenshire local authority area and the second being two local focus areas. In these local focus areas, James Hutton Institute carried out extensive community and landowner engagement on land use change issues. The two local focus areas were the Upper Dee within Cairngorms National Park boundary and the Huntly area.

The Aberdeenshire Land Use Strategy Pilot ran from April 2013 until March 2015. The findings fed into the revised Land Use Strategy which was published in March 2016. If you would like more information on the Pilot, please email James Davidson, the Project Officer, at J.Davidson@aberdeenshire.gov.uk or Irina Birnie, Project Manager at irina.birnie@aberdeenshire.gov.uk